Crowdbooster Python Interview Setup Instructions

python_interview_setup.md

Thanks for taking time to interview with us! We have come up with a problem that we hope you will find fun and challenging and which will give us insight into the way you code and debug.

Please be prepared to share your screen during the call. On many computers, Skype screen sharing slows the computer down quite a bit, so make sure to close any unneeded programs. Rather than force you to write code on a whiteboard or in an unfamiliar web editor, we want you to be comfortable with your environment and have access to your usual preferred setup, code editor, debugging environment, and other tools. Pulling up documentation is totally fine as well.

Problem

When the call starts, you'll be linked to a Github repo containing the problem. To avoid any issues setting up your environment during the call, please do the following:

Requirements

You should have the following installed:

git
python 2.7.X (we use 2.7.10)
pip

git

If you don't have git installed, please download it from https://git-scm.com/. The specific version shouldn't be an issue, but if you have an older version of git (< 2.2.1), you might want to upgrade because of security vulnerabilities.

python

Your computer is very likely to come with python 2.7.X pre-installed. You can verify this by running

python -V

in your terminal. If this raises an error, please install python 2.7.X (preferably the newest version starting with 2.7). Instructions to this vary based on platform, you should be able to Google them easily.

pip

To check whether pip is installed, run

pip -V

If the command fails, please follow the instructions in the next section to install pip.

If that succeeds, please run:

pip install requests==2.5.3

If pip isn't installed

Save get-pip.py to your computer from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py. In your terminal of choice, cd into the folder where you saved get-pip.py to, and run python get-pip.py. pip should now be installed (you can check by running which pip).

Virtual environments

We all use virtual environments-- if you already have that set up on your dev machine, you can go ahead and create a new virtual environment for this problem, activate it, and run pip install requests==2.5.3 for just this problem.

Cloning the repo

Once the call starts, we'll share the Github repo with you. Please clone this repository to your computer by running git clone XYZ where XYZ is the HTTPS or SSH GitHub clone URL you can get from the repository page. The repository will be cloned to a subfolder with the repository name.

PANIC! I can't get my environment set up

If any other issues come up with your environment set up, don't worry - we can try resolving it together at the start of the interview or fall back to doing the interview without running the code.